I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

Close your eyes and click your heals three times...because there's no place like Dome.

The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn, and roared around the drunkenly weaving limousine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limodriver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

...stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel sh*t from a sitting position.